These photographs were created in the historic mining town of Atlanta, Idaho, near the Sawtooth Wilderness Area. The community of 19 residents is peppered with artists and historians who graciously allowed me to enter and photograph unoccupied summer cabins, most without electricity or running water.
The quiet and artful contents of each primitive pantry and china cabinet provided a dreamlike palette for my interest in still-life imagery. My aesthetic relies heavily on the historical signifiers of the genre: food, vessel, bone, and smoke reference bounty, earthly pleasures, and the fleeting nature of life as in Vanitas paintings of Old Masters. The semblance breaks by the use of photography as both media and subject.
When looking at these photographs, imagine yourself in my shoes: you are alone, entering a dark, quiet wooden cabin that has been furnished in Gold Rush period style. The only sound is a warm breeze outside that stubbornly nudges the screen door open and shut as it snakes its way through a grove of Quaking Aspen trees outside. Dust and debris has been carefully shushed away from primitive floors, tabletops and mantles; but the corpses of honeybees are left behind, saved for their tragic, delicate beauty.
I used an iPhone, a Fuji Instax camera, and a large-format film camera to make the physical photographs placed within each composition. I waited patiently in the Atlanta School’s makeshift barn/darkroom for a latent image to surface on the paper negative and I waited impatiently for an image to materialize on my camera’s LCD screen. As I worked, stories and characters emerged from among the kettles and candlesticks. The stories I see reflect a culture of voracious visual image appetite and duplication. Meanwhile the characters are concerned with a search for self by means of “selfie” and a desire for a sense of belonging. I feel these anthropomorphic visions are in the eye of the beholder. So often, the stories I see are my own.
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